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Archive for the tag “performance”

We have a new type of collection, available in both our Cincom Smalltalk products, ObjectStudio and VisualWorks.

The name of it is …. (drum-roll please) “Treap” ….. What?!

I know, it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

So what exactly is a “Treap”?

The name Treap is a contraction of the names “Tree” and “Heap”, and is a type of balanced binary tree. It is not new as a computer science data structure, but as a new addition to our products, you may want to know where and how it can be used effectively.

What is it, and how does it compare with more traditional Smalltalk collections?

Treap is more of a hybrid collection, which makes it very versatile and useful, in the right context.

It has fast keyed lookup (like a Dictionary).

It can use ordered access (like an Array or an OrderedCollection) with enumeration, but the objects are ordered or sorted based on the key.

It also allows bidirectional access to the ordered list.

Treap is structured as a balanced binary tree of nodes. Each node holds the key and value objects and are also linked as a bi-directional linked list.

In what circumstances might a Treap be useful?

If you are using a Dictionary for lookup and also enumerate through the sorted keys of the dictionary, a Treap might be a better solution, since it already maintains a sorted order based on the keys.

Alternatively if you are using a SortedCollection, but need faster random look-up speed, a Treap might just be the best choice.

Another use is if you have to find an object (quickly), and then access the objects just before or after it. In this scenario you would look-up the node, and then get the prior or following node with #previous or #next respectively, to navigate the linked list forward and backwards.

Are there any drawbacks?

Just like using any Collection or data-structure, there are advantages and trade-offs to using each one. For Treap, the main drawback is probably the space and overhead to have and maintain the nodes and their links. My suggestion would be to only consider using it only where you are getting the benefit of the order and look-up speed, and possibly navigation.

Finding Treap. Treap came into the products as a means for supporting the performance of Text2. You can use it as Text2.Treap for access. In the future Treap may move into the Collection hierarchy where you would expect to find it.

Performance: In some simple bench-marking, I find look-up speed using Treap comparable to a dictionary. If you then have to enumerate through the elements based on the sorted dictionary keys, using a Treap is significantly faster, since it essentially skips the sort by already maintaining that order.

In the meantime, I have made some additions and tweaks for Treap that you may find of use and interest. The methods add in some of the enumerators for a collection class (#do: #select: #collect: #keysDo: ) that were either missing, or could perform better. See the methods (for the instance side of Treap) below.

I look forward to any feedback, particularly if you have a good use for Treap in your applications!

For developers finding and solving performance bottlenecks can be highly productive with the right tools and knowledge, and it can be a very rewarding part of application development

Most developers find the performance of Cincom Smalltalk to be more than adequate, especially when compared to other dynamic languages. We have a high performance Jit’ed (just in time compilation) VM. But what if you need more?

We take the performance needs of our customers seriously, and address it on a number of fronts. Here are some notes on approaches for finding performance in Cincom Smalltalk (ObjectStudio & VisualWorks):

1) Big performance gains are done by changing the algorithm and approach. Smalltalk is excellent at letting you see the big picture and rearrange structure to change algorithms, seeing the forest through the trees if you will. Lower level languages are far more difficult to do this since you are much more locked in to an approach.

2) If there is a small time critical section, you can write it in C and call it from Smalltalk.

Many think they will do this, but most end up not needing to when performance is better than expected.

3) We have Polycephaly, a framework that lets you easily leverage multi-core processors. Many customers have adopted this, and have gotten 2-5x throughput improvements. Polycephaly gives you 80% of the benefits, with 20% of the difficulty. We have Polycephaly II being introduced in the upcoming release (preview) which lets you include remote machines.

4) We have 64 bit vm’s which let you utilize a very large object space. This allows some applications to keep all its data cached in object memory, boosting performance significantly.

5) It is possible to use VW with CUDA GPU acceleration for number crunching. Modern GPU’s can give supercomputer like speed to number crunching.

6) We are continuing to incrementally improve the performance of our VM’s. Most recently we have improved garbage collection performance in our VM’s. This is a staid area of the VM, yet we continue to find ways to improve it.

7) We have performance profiling tools to pinpoint where time is being spent, so you can focus on areas that will give the most rewards. Research has demonstrated that developer’s guesses as to where time is spent is usually inaccurate, which is why these tools are so valuable. Our profiling tools let you find where lots of time is being spent so you can focus your efforts where it will make the most difference, or get that last increment in performance to give you the edge.

Looking back in history, Xerox PARC had bright minds and lots of money which they used to invent many aspects of modern computing. The VM technology they created is very sophisticated, and is still a significant barrier to entry in the dynamic language field. Sure the technology has been out for quite a while, but typically only companies with strong resources (think google v8 vm) have been able to do something with the sophistication of our vm technology. In the meantime, we have not sat on our laurels, but have continued to refine and improve the technology.